How to Translate What I Write Into Something Awesome

Slow down. Slower. I have to whisper these words to myself countless times as I type. I’ve got a problem, simply put. I think way too fast, and my fingers can’t keep up. It usually translates into incomprehensible rants when I post. I try to go back over it before I post, and I usually catch lots of instances where I start a thought, then have another pop up and I immediately start typing about that. It’s a good thing I don’t try to use the internet for debate anymore. I don’t think I could make a single point, were I to try to make a subtle, nuanced, argument about something I’d just be out of luck.  I’ll go back and re read posts I’ve made, or even worse, comments I’ve made on other people’s posts, and not know what the Hell I was trying to say.

I think what happens is that as my mind moves on to the next point, my fingers are playing catch up the whole time, always falling further and further behind. So if I were to try to make some salient point by drawing out a longish metaphor about how writing is similar to, say, making friend rice. I might have this vague plan in mind to each ingredient of my fried rice recipe to a corresponding component to telling a story.  So, in an effort to amaze you all, I’d begin with the rice, comparing it to the plot, explain how the rice by itself is just texture, offering very little flavor or sensory appreciation on its own, yet still manages to be the most important component – because when poorly prepared, no amount of additional ingredients, no matter how expertly prepared, can salvage the dish.

Then I’d probably move on to talk about the onions, how they subtly flavor the whole dish, and how that might be like using a particularly potent emotion can flavor the whole story, no one wants to cry through their entire meal because some moron butchered an onion and dumped it on your beautiful rice. In the same way, no one can sustain a whole, novel length piece without some other flavors in there. Can’t spend 10 hours crying in front of a book, it’d be awful.

Whatever, you get the idea. So, how would I write something like that? Probably like this:

Writing is like fried rice. You know, but onions can make you cry, so don’t do that. Also, plot is like rice. I hate Burger King.

Yep, that’s looks pretty close to what I’d write. So, through the workday especially, I pop by folk’s blogs and leave inane comments – know that I was in a hurry, doing it in down moments at work, and probably typed it on my phone using only my thumbs. You’ll just have to take the stupid, and see the brilliance that was intended.

The Thing About Adverbs

In my last post, I made a snarky comment about the suckage of adverbs. Actually, I made mention of the fact that 87% of all writing advice on the internet boils down to not using them. A host of comments about said advice got me to thinking about why they're not so good. And then it hit me.

Adverbs suck because they are like nuclear energy, an answer to some problems, but also a weapon of mass destruction. Here, let me explain my thought by example.

Jimmy ran down the hallway.


Okay, in the previous sentence we learn something interesting about Jimmy, he was running. The sentence serves its purpose by conveying essential information about the character, namely that he is running. In a vacuum this is fine, but perhaps there is more going on here, you know, subtext. So, in the hands of our nameless author this becomes an opportunity to insert something subtle into the scene.

Jimmy ran plaintively down the hallway.


There, now it's all literary.Of course, the problem with something like that is I, the reader, have no idea what in the world to conjure up as a mental image now. What does plaintive running look like? I think the mythical writer is trying to be more descriptive, more precise, but instead, they confused matters. Adverbs, they may not suck in of themselves, but they really go a long way towards making things worse when used indiscriminately.

How should that sentence read? Well, I have no idea really. If I were to try my hand at writing a sentence that told that someone was sad, and running, then I would probably expand it into two sentences.Like this:

Jimmy tore down the hallway as fast as he could, his arms and legs pumping like pistons in a revving engine. He blinked back his tears and tried not to wonder if he was too late.


Granted, I've never been much of a wordsmith, and if I were to really try to improve on it I'd probably drop the simile altogether and maybe throw something else out there about his heart racing or something.

But the point is that single word, plaintively, sought to convey a lot of information but made things worse - probably have been better off if it were just nixed. If my melodramatic version was too much, then I'd rather just say 'he ran'. I'd rather be a bit too bland than over the top.

But like many powerful weapons, adverbs are enticing, and they hold so much power that it can be hard to resist. Then they blow up and you've irradiated your whole story. So, like gun safety, sometimes it's just easier to say to avoid them altogether instead of using them wisely.

That's my take anyway. Do with it what you will.

Adverbs again? Don't make me do more math.

Advanced Writing Tips

I write, but don’t like to write about writing too much. There are plenty of folk who actually know what they’re talking about that have tons of good advice, some that have a touch of bad advice, and an assorted few that, if you were to do what they say, might ruin you.

I think I’m more like the latter of the three.

I’ve seen so many lists of things to be avoided I couldn’t possibly count them all – but then I read a bestseller and I see almost all those ‘don’ts’ done over and over again by folks like George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling, Patrick Rothfuss - bestseller’s all - then it dawns on me; Those rules don’t really matter, well, they do, but not as much as we’d all like to think. I think I’ve figured out the big secret.

It’s all about the story. It trumps everything. Using cliché’d dialog can be annoying, characters that behave stupidly is infuriating. But of those three authors I mentioned above, all have moments that make me frustrated, in the case of Patrick Rothfuss, I find I roll my eyes a lot. But I keep reading. And so do lots of other folks. Why? Because they tell great stories.

But, I do read a lot of those helpful tips and have been collecting them mentally, trying to summarize the thousands of posts I’ve read over the course of my time on the internet, then I mixed them with my own personal wisdom and have finally summed them up into a few short do’s and don’ts.

Do’s:

Write something awesome

Don’ts:

Write something awesome that contains adverbs. Adverbs cancel out awesome. It’s math. An exception can be made if you use awesome adverbs, but those are rare.

You can thank me later.

Well, who would have thunk? The math adds up, adverbs do suck